You hear the one about the high school Honors English teacher in Illinois who was suspended because he gave his students an optional assignment which involved reading an article about homosexuality in animals from a respected science publication? Wacky stuff! Why is a teacher trying to poison our children with learning?
Monday, November 2, 2009
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His laminated, taped-on, marker-fixed, MS Publisher "name plate" has made me feel sad on top of pissed.
Don't blame Illinois - anything south of Roosevelt Road is Missouri in my world.
let me guess-- are you white and live on the north side?
living*
After two decades in Western Illinois and Hyde Park, I know of what I speak. It's a completely different world down there.
I'll raise you a Richard Pryor and a Miles Davis, and soldier on with the cross of the Downstate Hick.
As they say, "it won't play in Peoria" - that's why Pryor left. And Alton is even stranger!
sorry for being defensive, but i live in hyde park too and i have to put up with a lot of shit for not having a a cute boutique or whateverthefuck in walking distance
@ Meredith - No apologies necessary! I know the Hyde Park angst well. I escaped Hyde Park in 99 and moved to the north side. But I still visit my barber Mitch at Yehia on 53rd every four weeks and I still have my membership with the Seminary co-op.
I assume they'll also be canceling the FFA's production of Deliverance.
Hey now, leave the FFA alone.
Maybe if I type about it here, my brain will stop showing me scenes from In And Out?
I can't recall whether or not the America I grew up in had gay animals. I'm hoping it did because I want the America I grew up in.
That's because the America you grew up in had terrible teachers.
A good round of forced prayer will take care of this.
Now I'm thinking of people praying in "Row Row Row Your Boat" rounds.
And the Google Ads next to this post are telling me not to let public schools "teach homosexual marriage." The call's coming from inside the house!
The storm is here, nom, nom, nom...
Evangelical Christians should have no problem with such an article, for there can be no comparison between the human and animal worlds: humans are not animals; humans did not evolve from lower life forms. Right?
This is one of my favorite fundie contradictary arguments. Many behaviors that fundamentalists dislike are branded "unnatural," despite the fact that creationism as a philosophy pretty much precludes one from drawing analogies from the natural world.
I'm pretty sure what they mean is "not according to the nature which God gave humanity, which would be different from the nature accorded the rest of the animal kingdom. So while it might be natural for a female black widow to kill her mate, it would not necessarily be natural for a female human to kill her mate. The difference, (I think) they would argue, would be that animals function according to instinct, while humans are capable of rational choice (reason being the Divine Image which God put into them at the beginning), and so can choose certain goods and reject others.
Wait 'til they find out about the monkeys jacking off at the zoo.
How did the flower children of the sixties turn into such uptight parents?
Our area high schools have seen a resurgence of the streaking fad, and angry parents actually got the cops to arrest one seventeen year old streaker and charge him with a sex offense.
Today's problems aren't with the kids, it's with their parents.
With the obesity epidemic amongst today's younger set, I am all for charging him with crimes against humanity....
I would posit that folks in rural America weren't the flower children of the sixties. They were the ones pining for the good old days of Eisenhower.
What a Dan D.
The only upside to this is that I'm sure Mr. DeLong's students have all read the article now.
Well, its just one parent that complained. That's a small positive....there wasn't a large group with pitchforks and Palin t-shirts storming the school board.
One problem that I have with the reporting on this is no one is letting us know the context of the assignment. Was this a point/counter-point extra credit assignment? What context did it have with honors English?
My honors English in a small town public school never had us reading things of actual *use* like that...just mostly dead white guys, with a little Bronte and Dickinson sprinkled in. I had plenty of teachers pushing various agendas through high school, some more heavy-handed than others....and then there was the civics class where you could earn extra credit by writing letters to congressmen on a pre-approved list of causes.
OK, that last student was so nice it made me a little misty-eyed. He's exactly why teachers put up with crap like this.
I'm almost done with my M.S. in elemementary ed, and it's shit like this that makes me want to drop out. I had an awesome prof. recommend some children's books about having two moms or two dads because, I don't know, IT HAPPENS SOMETIMES. There was such an uproar in my class. Seriously, shit like, we cannot teach homosexuality, and it is a sin/evil, etc...Everytime one of our prof. mentioned something, a student in my class issued a complaint. Then just last week, a student said that they would feel uncomfortable teaching the story of Galileo because it paints the Catholic church in a negative light. Oh, I live in Chicago. Not that he believes that the planets revolve around the earth, but it takes just one parent...
Forgive my clunky writing, please. This stuff just pisses me off.
Dear god, you are living at the old Stroger hospital site? What school is this that students are getting pissy about the Catholic church being painted in a bad light? Certainly not DePaul....
My mother is a teacher, and it's like you have to teach to the lowest common denominator now.
Ridonkulous.
Really he has done wrong and should be punished for drifting away from the guided and stated course module. It is must know his intentions. I think that fellow has not receive proper teaching training.